After loss, people often say the same things.
They say our loved ones are in a better place.
They say they are still with us in spirit.
They say they are at peace.
I understand why these words are offered.
They are meant to steady something that feels unbearable.
But they do not reach where my grief actually lives.
My children’s place was here. With me.
That is not a metaphor. It is a fact. They lived in this world. They occupied rooms. They altered the shape of my days. When they died, that place was emptied.
Saying they are in a better place asks me to exchange what was real for something imagined. I cannot do that. Their lives did not continue somewhere else. Their lives ended here.
People also say they are still with me in spirit.
What I know is this. They are with me in memory.
Memory matters. I am grateful for it. I hold it tightly, sometimes as if loosening my grip might lessen who they were. As if forgetting details would reduce the weight of their existence. As if memory itself is a form of preservation.
But memory is not presence.
It does not answer back. It does not fill a room. It does not put arms around you when everything goes quiet.
I still want their voices. Their laughs. Their physical closeness.
I have spent more time than I like to admit trying to figure out how to bring them back so I could have those things again. Not symbolically. Literally. That was not poetic longing. It was bargaining in a world that does not bargain.
People say they are at peace.
Knowing they are not suffering does matter to me. But those words are not comforting in the way people expect them to be. If I am honest, I would bring them back to suffer if it meant having them here again. I am glad I do not get to make that choice for them. That knowledge carries its own complicated kind of mercy.
People often call continuation strength. I have already written about why that word misses.
Continuing is not a virtue. It is not a choice. It is what happens when stopping is not an option. Life moves forward whether we consent or not. We move with it because the structure of the world requires it.
Time is sometimes described as the thing that teaches you how to wear the mask better. That can feel true in the earliest days, when everything inside has collapsed but the outside world still expects participation. In that period, functioning is performance.
But time itself is not a teacher of falsehood.
What time actually allows is meaning. Not justification. Not healing. Meaning.
Their lives mattered. Their lives had weight and substance and impact, even though the outcome was not what we wanted.
Their deaths did not erase the meaning of their lives.
But nothing about their deaths feels fair.
Anger belongs there. Not as bitterness, but as recognition.
I do not live in bitterness, though it surfaces at times.
I choose not to stay there. That choice does not erase the pain. It only defines where I will not make my home.
This is not about correcting anyone else’s grief language.
It is about explaining why certain words never quite land for me.
Grief does not need to be reframed to be survivable.
It needs to be named accurately.
